This collection, from
the University of Texas Press, includes an introduction by Will H. Corral, and
as he points out; Monterroso’s prose is
supple, analytical, full of irony and intricate nuances. What also emerges in
his work…is writing that peels away the social veneers that conceal the beast
within human beings and reveals all that they have accomplished or undone
throughout history. He continues on; reading
them (the short stories) will prove
the futility of discussing their contents in full.
This book contains two
collections of short stories “Complete Works (and Other Stories)” and “Perpetual
Motion”, the first collection originally published as “Obras completas (y otros
cuentos)” in 1959 and “Movimiento perpetuo” in 1972. This book released in 1995
was translated by Edith Grossman, arguably the most important translator of
Latin American and Spanish fiction, translating both Nobel Laureates Mario
Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez along with numerous other works
including Miguel de Cervantes “Don Quixote” and although I generally don’t talk
about my impressions of the translation (not having a strong enough handle on
the original languages) this collection reads as another wonderful example of
the literature of Latin America.
Monterroso was born in
Honduras to a Honduran mother and a Guatemalan father, and at age fifteen his
family settled definitively in Guatemala City. In 1944 he was detained at exiled
to Mexico City for his opposition to the dictatorial regime, but soon
afterwards, with a change in government he was assigned a minor post in the
Guatemalan embassy in Mexico. Spending time in Bolivia, Santiago de Chile and
Mexico City (where he primarily lived and worked from 1956 until his death in 2003),
he was awarded the Mexican government’s honour the Águila Azteca (the Order of
the Aztec Eagle the highest Mexican order awarded to foreigners in the
country). Along with the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award for Literature
(received in 2000 and award with an honour roll which includes Mario Vargas
Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Antonio Muñoz Molia, and non-Spanish writers such as
Ismail Kadere, Leonard Cohen, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Günter Grass and
Doris Lessing) Monterroso received the Miguel Ángel Asturia National Prize for
his body of work, the most important literary award in Guatemala.
Even the title of the
work, “Complete Works and Other Stories”, leads you towards the playfulness of
this collection, although there is a story called “Complete Works” the idea of
there being no finality sits nicely with the feeling of these stunning stories.
The collection opens
with the story “Mister Taylor”, a tale of the shrunken head trade, an economy
that is built on the export of shrunken heads, and when they start to run
out???
According to this remarkable law, the gravely ill were given twenty-four
hours to put their affairs in order and die, but if in this time they had the
good fortune to infect their families, they received a month-long reprieve for
each relative they infected. Victims of minor illnesses, and those who simply
did not feel well, deserved the scorn of the entire nation, and any passerby
was entitled to spit in their faces. For the first time in history the
importance of doctors who cured no one was recognized (there were several
candidates for the Nobel prize among them). Dying became an example of the
highest patriotism, not only on the national level but on an even more glorious
continental scale.
So many parallels with
our own economies of mining, trade deficits, health care systems, patriotism
and more, captured in a few short pages. An enlightening read with a preposterous
premise.
As our introduction
points out, there is no classifying of these stories, as soon as you think you
have found a common thread, Monterroso throws another curve ball at you,
keeping you alert, amused and astounded. Even the art of writing itself comes
under the microscope, in “Leopoldo (His Labours)”:
Leopoldo was a meticulous writer who showed himself no mercy. From the
age of seventeen he had devoted all his time to literature. His thoughts were
fixed on literature the entire day. His mind worked with intensity, and he
never allowed himself to succumb to sleep before ten thirty at night. Leopoldo,
however, suffered from one defect: He did not like to write. He read, took
notes, made observations, attended conferences, criticized bitterly the
deplorable Spanish in the newspapers, solved difficult crossword puzzles as a
mental exercise (or for relaxation); his only friends were writers, he thought,
spoke, ate and slept as a writer, but he was seized by deep terror when the
time came to pick up his pen. Although his constant dream was to become a
famous writer, he delayed the moment of realization with the classic excuses:
you have to live first, first you have to read everything, Cervantes wrote Don
Quixote at an advanced age, without experience there can be no art – and other
similar arguments. Until the age of seventeen, it had not occurred to him to be
an artist. His calling came to him from the outside. He was forced into it by
circumstances. Leopoldo remembered how it had all started and thought he could
even write a story about it. For a few moments his mind wandered from Katz’s
book.
The title story “Complete
Works” is very reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño, a story full of cafes, poets,
praise of others works, analysis of “diverse literatures”, probably written
when Bolaño was five years of age, I possibly should have referred to Bolaño
being influenced by Monterroso!!!
The second collection
here “Perpetual Motion” is an homage to the humble fly, with each short story
(all thirty-two of them) having an epigram related to the fly, for example the
story “How I Got Rid Of Five Hundred Books” opens with:
The misanthrope: The sun is good only for
reviving the flies that suck my blood.
Jules Renard, Diary
reviving the flies that suck my blood.
Jules Renard, Diary
However, as a reader
you are left wondering as to the relevance of the reference, even though the
opening story is called “Flies” and opens with “There are three themes: love,
death, and flies.”, analysis of the theme is useless, although I’m sure there
is a thesis there.
Economic reform, or
absurdity, comes to the fore in the story “The Brain Drain”, not as subtle as
the exporting of shrunken heads the moral is simple:
For each cluster of bananas that Guatemala exports, she earns one and a
half cents, paid in taxes by the United Fruit Company, and especially useful to
the government in maintaining the social stability and police-imposed order
that make it possible to produce another cluster of bananas without
interference. True, thousands of clusters are exported each year, but it must
also be recognized that aside from order, and not taking into account the depletion
of the soil on which this crop is raised, the benefits have been fairly meagre.
What a difference when a brain is exported! It is evident that exporting the
brain of Miguel Angel Asturias has brought notable benefits to Guatemala,
including a Nobel Prize. Although many other brains have left the country, as
far as anyone can tell they have not made a single crack in the nation’s
structure; on the contrary, the country seems better off without them and is
making more progress than ever.
This is a playful,
thought provoking collection, humorous, bleak, deep, superficial, a complete
mixture of classic Latin American literature. All obsessive readers and book
collectors need to buy this collection, if only for the short story “How I Got
Rid Of Five Hundred Books”, a tale of the angst of having a growing book collection,
the ritual culling, the logic that would go into such a task and written with
such humour.
This books forms part
of my Classics Club reviews, where I intend to read and review fifty “classics”
between now and the end of 2020. More on that journey can be seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment